How to Enable Gzip Compression in WordPress

What is Gzip Compression?

gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and intended for use by GNU (the “g” is from “GNU”).

There’s multiple ways to enable Gzip:

Apache

If you’re using Apache as HTTP service on your server, the most common way is to add the following scripts to your WordPress .htaccess file in order to enable Gzip compression:

Copy & paste to .htacess file in your Wordpress root

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<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

# Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)

BrowserMatch^Mozilla/4gzip-only-text/html

BrowserMatch^Mozilla/4\.0[678]no-gzip

BrowserMatch\bMSIE!no-gzip!gzip-only-text/html

Header append Vary User-Agent

</IfModule>

Nginx

For those who use Nginx, you may include the following snippet in your configuration file( usually it would be /etc/nginx/nginx.conf)